This Continuous Song

JOSH KUN: I feel like this is like an episode of, like, the newlywed game, trying to see if we're getting we're going to get each other wrong.

[Jazz in style of William Parker - percussion, no vocals - plays] 

KUN: My name is Josh Kun, coming to you from Pasadena, California. I teach in the Annenberg school of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

FRED MOTEN: Uh, my name is Fred Moten. I live in New York city. I teach in the department of performance studies at New York University.

KUN: As a listener, Fred is always—you know, you're almost like a key member of this invisible assembly of listeners that I feel like are always in my mind when I'm listening.

Like, there's this continuous song, this continuous musicalization of life that, when I hear something that moves me profoundly, or confuses me profoundly, or outrages me profoundly, one of the people I immediately think of who I want to share it with is Fred.

I've been listening a lot to this recent batch of William Parker recordings that the 10 recordings of Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World, that I wanted to talk to you about. But specifically, there was a track that jumped out at me in terms of our relationship, which is his track called “Baldwin” from the Majesty of Jah album.

[On cue, William Parker’s “Baldwin”, a lively jazz song with vocal riffs, percussion, hi-hats, and smooth brass plays. It plays for a few moments before fading out.]

KUN: But it just made me think about Baldwin. It made me think about you and William Parker. 

And I'm just wondering what your feelings are about the role that Baldwin's legacy is continuing to play in this ever unfolding moment that we're in.

MOTEN: I guess in a way, man, it's like, you always have to take into account where the reception of Baldwin was when he passed in 1987. You know, the reviews that he had been getting for his last novels and his last essays, the claim was that he had fallen into a kind of bitterness; that's what people were saying.

And, you know, there was also a way that, maybe even just within the framework of the sort of black reception of Baldwin, there were other folks, there were other voices that had become maybe more predominant, but it was also maybe this feeling of like immediately, once we lost him, we began to try to come to grips with the magnitude of what we had lost.

And I think there was also, then, a way in which, as periodically, every four or five years, dominant institutions, for whatever reason, try, almost always unsuccessfully, to come to grips [short laugh] with their own problems, their own racism, their own anti-Blackness, their own exclusionary brutalities.

And Baldwin always feels like the convenient person for them to go to. It's as if there's something in the way that Baldwin thinks about love and in the way that Baldwin thinks about hope, that it allows generally unloving and [laugh-talking] unhopeful people to attach themselves to that just for a minute.

[Parker’s “Baldwin” plays again. Jazz vocalist sings: “James Baldwin to the rescue, to the rescue, James Baldwin to the rescue, again and again and again…” the music fades out as Moten continues.]

MOTEN: And by the same token— and this is an even trickier thing, right?— there's something about the intensity of Baldwin's anger that allows people who are not nearly as angry as they think they should be— they tap into Baldwin too. So, he becomes a proxy for all these feelings that the people who invoke him usually don't have, [laugh], you know? But I believe that some people do have those feelings, and I also feel like, man, certainly William Parker feels Baldwin, and you can feel that feeling in his playing.

[Parker’s “Baldwin” plays again. Jazz vocalist sings: “What do I see? What do I see? I see madness and sadness, and superficial gladness…”]

MOTEN: I totally understand why it is that the descendants of those who were stolen— I am a descendant of the stolen, you know? And I feel having been stolen in my own body, okay? Like, I feel it. It is, on the one hand, an experience that is not mine in a personal way, but it is my experience, somehow. It is the experience out of which I emerge, and I feel it, okay?

So, I know. I totally understand, because I am constantly exhibiting, myself, that move where one says, “I can't let you steal from me anymore,” [laughs], you know? “I can't let you steal from me anymore. I have to reclaim what has been stolen.”

[Instrumental jazz in the style of William Parker plays.] 

[Bessie Smith’s St. Louis Blues plays. Jazz vocalist sings:“Like a man done throwed that rock down into de sea…” The song continues as Moten speaks.]

MOTEN: You know, what it is to listen is, in a certain sense, to be accompanied by other listeners, right? To be in the company of other listeners, and that those other listeners are in your head, with you. First of all, Baldwin is like an extraordinary listener.

And you can already hear it in Go Tell It on the Mountain. You can hear the intensity in the depth and the devotion of his listening, not only to music, but to speech, or to the music in speech, and in Black speech. 

MOTEN: And, you know, it's something that he writes about in the nonfiction when he reflects on his own work as a novelist, that he had to listen to Bessie Smith in order to finish, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

[Smith’s St. Louis Blues plays out.] 

MOTEN: Maybe the other thing is that his listening is inseparable from his looking, and maybe that's where the Buford Delaney connection comes in.

Baldwin's connection to his mentor, the great painter Buford Delaney. He talks about Buford Delaney teaching him how to look at things, how to see, but he also talks about Buford Delaney teaching him how to listen. 

[Instrumental jazz in style of Parker plays] 

KUN: It makes me think of a lot of things. The first of them is something you wrote, and I can't remember right now where, about the difference between voice and sound.

And that the voice is often always linked to the container of the individual. That the voice is meant to wholly and deeply represent someone individually versus sound, which has a broader envelope. And so, it made me think of James Joyce's “The Dead.” And there's a scene in “The Dead”  that I've never been able to shake, which is when Gabriel is at the bottom of the stairs looking up at his wife, who is looking at the dance floor, and he's watching her listen to a voice, a sung voice, and he's full of love for her and that, and almost lust for her in that moment, but then realizes he's watching her listen to someone else's voice, and, in that voice, is her love for someone else. 

[Instrumental jazz in style of Parker plays] 

KUN: You know this question for me, Fred, of listening and what that means, you know— last year, at the very end of April, I suddenly went deaf in one ear, and my whole life seemed to just flip, which sounds so silly in hindsight, cause, you know, one lives through things like this all the time. But it philosophically upended me around everything I built my life around, which was this thing about the ear. You know, I have a whole chapter in, [laugh-talking], my first book on the ear and listening as linked to the ear.

And I've had to now try to figure out what, if anything, can listening mean if it's not through the ear. 

MOTEN: I can't imagine what it would mean for someone who has lived so deeply and so brilliantly by ear, [laugh], as you. To, to have to confront that, that loss or that attenuation. 

And I know it's deep, cause I know everyone's closest relations are structured that way, but yours may be even more so. Living with a musician, having that be a part of the intensity of your connection, and so, it makes your invocation of that Joyce scene so much more deep. But you've already given us in the image and the idea of a listener in your head. 

But to know that the voices in your head, that the sounds in your head, are also experiences of listening. So that gives us a way of understanding how it is that sound and how it is that music remains for us. And it remains for us in these deep ways by way of the other senses too. Like, maybe that's the most immediate compensation.

[Instrumental jazz in style of Parker plays again.] 

MOTEN: How do you have music now? 

KUN: I'm learning new ways of thinking through this. You know, I have it in the conventional way still. I've got one ear that interprets music in the way that I've been used to interpreting music. 

But the fear of losing complete hearing, coupled with one ear that can't listen in the conventional way, I think has, like you said, made me kind of dig deep into all this stuff I've taught for, you know, over two decades, but never actually— how little I actually understood.

But whenever I teach my classes on music, I always start with this question to students about how do you define music? And two of the definitions I always pull up, one is from [Walt] Whitman, who says that “music is not what comes from a flute, or a violin, or from a drum; music is what is already in you that the drum awakens, or that the flute awakens.” And then [Duke] Ellington, 

[Piano keys tap away as Kun speaks. It’s an archival sound of Duke Ellington playing.] 

KUN: you know, the famous, um, clip of Ellington sitting at the piano, and being asked to describe what he's playing, what kind of music he's playing, and he says, “this is not music, this is dreaming.” 

[In the archive, Ellington continues to play soft, meandering music at the piano. Then he says, “that’s dreaming,” and plays a few more notes before the sound fades out.]  

MOTEN: You also wrote a book called, [laughs], Audiotopia. 

KUN: I'm telling you, I'm like, this is a cliche, Fred.

MOTEN: But it's not because— and I totally hear you about that thing where you write something and you think you know, and you don't know [laughs]. But it doesn't negate the fact that you wrote it and maybe it means, in addition to trying to figure out a way to catch up to Baldwin, sometimes we even have to catch up to ourselves.

Sound becomes place. Sound becomes this place that we live in. Another way of thinking about Audiotopia is as a kind of soundscape. And obviously, there's a utopian dimension that's given in the word that you coin.

[Ellington’s “Three Little Words,” a sleepy and nostalgic sounding song, plays underneath Moten speaking.]

MOTEN: And maybe that's the dreaming part that Ellington is talking about. We enter into an auditorium with other listeners where we dream of another place. But not in a passive way, not in a way that absolves us from the responsibility of making that other place.  

And it's a feedback loop, isn't it? I mean, the feedback loop is between we as listeners who get to accompany the musicians who are also listeners as they dream another place, and then we get to work with them in the making of that place.

[As he speaks, Moten punctuates his speech with his hand. He taps on his computer several times to emphasize his points.]

MOTEN: I think about this especially with regard to Ozomatli and the way you write so beautifully about them as musicians, but also them as Placemakers, as a band, that had a very specific understanding of the place that they were trying to make with other people. 

[Ellington’s “Three Little Words” fades in after Moten and fades away as Kun begins to speak.]

KUN: The history, both of Vegas and the casino world as being so crucial to Black musicians, especially at that time, in terms of just a pure gig economy, right? And, a source of employment, and money, and labor, of work, but also as a place that, if you weren't careful, would break your neck and dump you.

And I know you've got long history with Vegas and I would just love to hear from you a little bit about you and Vegas. 

MOTEN: My mom came to Vegas in the late 1960. And she was, you know, immediately folded into a community of folks who had migrated, Black people. who had migrated there from the South.

And there was even a, a very specific community who had come to Las Vegas from the same town that she lived in. So, she had friends from high school who then lived around the corner from us my whole growing up, and their names were Eloise Bush and QB Bush. But I just cannot tell you how many times I sat around the dinner table at Mr. Bush’s house while he was talking about the Moulin Rouge. 

[Live improvisational jazz at the Moulin Rouge begins to play. Drum beats snare, a bass thumps, bright brass plays, and a keyboard synchronizes. It’s both lively and moody. The jazz continues to play underneath Moten’s voice.]

MOTEN: He was always part of these groups who were trying to revive the Moulin Rouge, who were trying to— cause the Moulin Rouge was essentially run out of business by the larger hotels. 

Partly because it was so good at what it did and so good at what it did, because part of what it did was absolutely tied up with the fact that Black people could be there. Right? That was where you went to hear music. 

All the musicians on the strip would come to the Moulin Rouge to play after hours, right? The Moulin Rouge was taking business away from the strip and away from downtown because it was the place to be. 

But the Moulin Rouge was always this dream up until the minute that they tore it down, okay? Yeah, I used to drive past the Moulin Rouge every night. 

Anyway, I just remember Mr. Bush talking about the Moulin Rouge so much, and it really was a kind of talisman for the brutalities that Black folks had to suffer in Vegas. What it meant for Black people to be in this kind of horrific position of, on the one hand, being absolutely crucial to the gaming industry and the entertainment industry at the level of its basic infrastructure. 

All my aunts on my father's side, all my father's sisters were maids at the Landmark, at the Frontier, you know? 

To be absolutely crucial to the infrastructure of something that you were also excluded from. 

[The sound of jazz fades out.]

MOTEN: The humiliation of the exclusion was not ameliorated by the fact that they also built these amazing social institutions for themselves. The clubs and the churches that were all embedded in the community that I grew up in.

Those churches and those clubs were amazing, and they were beautiful, but they didn't make up for the fact of that exclusion. I think, in some ways, the Moulin Rouge came closest to something like that, but it didn't either, and it was not allowed to survive. 

[Parker’s “Baldwin” plays. Rhythmic drumbeats and a stand-up bass thump away.]

KUN: I was reading also that— I think in 74, 75— West Montgomery's brother, Monk Montgomery, founded the Las Vegas jazz society. 

MOTEN: I used to go to his house all the time because my mom was like a charter member of the Las Vegas jazz society.

When Monk Montgomery moved to Vegas, he started the Las Vegas jazz society. They would have shows. They used to have a kind of standing show, that was played in the Golden Nugget. He let my mom one time play one of West Montgomery's guitars because he had some of them in his house. And they would have these big picnics and fundraisers and stuff for the Las Vegas jazz society cause, cause Vegas was a good jazz town. 

A whole lot of people would come from LA to play. And on Jackson street, there were clubs, there was another hotel called the Carver house. 

Joe Pass was really strung out on heroin, he was on Jackson street. Mr. Bush saw him all the time. Then he got cleaned up and he kind of moved back to LA, and then Norman Granz picked him back up and he made all those great records on Pablo.

But yeah, Vegas was like that. I remember my mom was a school teacher, [laughs]. A couple of her students, one in particular was really like my older brother, named Mike Davis. He would get up early and go to school.

[The jazz playing underneath Moten gets more livelier and louder. Now, a brass instrument has joined in.]

MOTEN: And he would walk past the clubs on Jackson street, and they’d still being there jamming, getting down. And he would sneak up to the boarded-up window, [laughs] you know, so he could hear that music, and I'll never forget, I actually put it in a poem. He said, “man, that music used to mess me up.” 

People end up in Vegas, [laugh], or it used to be that way at least.

[Drums, bass, and trumpet play for a while before Moten continues.]

MOTEN: I guess when I was saying that people end up in Vegas, [laugh-talks], in a lot of ways the Nevada test site was one of the places where people end up. I mean, it's north of Vegas, you know, a couple of hours, north. 

But I worked at the Nevada test site, say, from the summer of 81 through the spring of 82 because I flunked out of Harvard my freshman year. So, I had to take a year off. And one of my mom's best friends, who still lives in Vegas, is a great woman named Lavonne Lewis. She got me a job working as a janitor at the Nevada test site. And one of my coworkers was this wonderful person who grew up in Red Hook in Brooklyn, named Frank Fitzpatrick. And he was really like my mentor when I worked at the test site. And we were basically two people who had messed up, you know? He had messed up in a certain kind of way and he really got me through— him and Ms. Lewis, really— got me through that year of working at the test site. And what could have been a kind of disaster turned out to be really amazing. Like, that year was probably the most important year that I had growing up because, you know, I read a lot of literature on the bus and I realized that I should probably be an English major, you know, it was stuff like that.

[The jazz that’s been playing underneath Moten as he spoke continues before Moten speaks again.]

MOTEN: Yeah, the Test Site was, [laughs], it was something else. But that was definitely my Las Vegas.

[The song picks up in volume. “Baldwin” by William Parker plays. A jazz vocalist sings: “James Baldiwn to the rescue, to the rescue / James Baldwin to the rescue, to the rescue / again and again, again and again...]